


Little White Lies

by billspilledquill



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Microfic, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22282711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: There are lies worth telling, he thought, and worth dying for.
Relationships: Hamlet/Horatio (Hamlet), Hamlet/Ophelia (Hamlet)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 32





	Little White Lies

**Author's Note:**

> The referenced production here is Almeida Theatre's 2017 version of _Hamlet_. A very small fic to commensurate the end of winter vac. Enjoy!

The courtroom was a tiny place that took him by the throat wherein Mother looked in with delight. She was lighter around the waist, and darker under the eyes; not that it mattered. He simply noticed. 

“Stay with us, Hamlet. Go not to France,” she ordered. He wondered how this family felt shame in cadence, and without restraint, gave it all to him. Hamlet was a name that was not his, nor it will never be. Just like the death: it stays. 

“I will,” he answered. 

* * *

His own room was a cemetery of some sorts that carried all his loved ones with him. Uncle came in and destroyed all the sanctity of the place, but it stopped mattering for a while. 

“You will be alright, son,” Uncle said, and Hamlet remembered all the time he loved him, once, young and naïve, with Father alive and frowning over battle plans. He once pretended Uncle was Father, out of pure spite. “You must realize that a father also lost a father, son. Be a man.”

“I will,” he said. 

* * *

Ophelia slept there, sometimes. He would kiss the nape of her head and be mad only in dreams. She would wake up, sometimes. She looked at him with worry all the times she dared. 

“Are you going to sleep, my lord?” She wondered more than she spoke. “Rest a little.”

He thought about her trembling body against hers, and not out of love. She was a beast, but Hamlet was not exactly a man either. 

“I will,” he promised. 

* * *

  
Horatio didn’t let him promise anything. He troubled him with the account of a ghost and made him promise nothing. Horatio talked about Father and his hands and how they couldn’t have been more like and didn’t speak to Hamlet like one would a child. He made him promise nothing of France, of recovery, of sleep. Horatio stayed like death stayed in Hamlet’s wake. 

“You will speak to it, my lord?” He asked. 

He had never spoken to Father, not alive, not dead. Their conversations passed fleetingly, always in the presence of Mother. No words ever reached Father’s ears. Not his. 

“Yes,” he said.

* * *

“How are you feeling, my lord?” And Polonius looked at him like he knew exactly the answer of the question. Hamlet shrugged, tried his best to look mad, and resumed to his reading. 

Her foolish father tried again. “What are you reading, my lord?”

It was a picture book. Father taking his hands reluctantly for the newspapers. Mother kissing his cheek when he cried over Horatio’s leave. Him kissing Horatio after they reunited at Wittenberg. The last one wasn’t in the book, but in his mind, and Hamlet supposed that it was good enough. 

“Words,” he tugged at its spine. Break it in half. “Words, words, words,” he sing-sang, then let the pictures came loose. 

* * *

  
Father did look frowningly. Surely displeased at the general state that his sometimes-son was; wild and whirling. He told him to avenge his foul murder. Hamlet answered that he will. 

“I suppose that he wasn’t kind,” Horatio whispered in his ears when Hamlet ended up in his arms. 

“He was kind,” he countered, then counted the number of times Horatio tended his hair. 

* * *

  
Ophelia asked him again. 

“I did sleep,” he said, and promised again. 

* * *

  
Mother did not. 

“I hate her,” he told to someone he forgot to name. “I think I have always.”

* * *

  
“I loved you,” he said to Ophelia, when she was present, and he was all memories, “once.”

“Then I am the most deceived,” she said, her head held high; her tears unhidden. He wondered how she did that, the last part. 

“I loved you,” he repeated, though he probably shouldn’t. “I loved you.”

* * *

Uncle stared when Hamlet pointed a gun to him. He looked like he was trying hard not to laugh.

“I’m praying,” he explained. “Can you?”

“I can,” he said, and couldn’t press the trigger. 

* * *

  
Horatio was something that resembled a miracle but not quite. Miracles were rarely handsome and did not speak so soothingly. Horatio shouted exactly once, and it was about him. It had, in some ways or another, always been so. 

“I love you,” Horatio would say sometimes. Much more often than the shouting. He would say it and Hamlet would shake his head; would stare. His gaze said something akin to _you should, or the sky will break in half._ Something like, _you have to, or the world will burn._

“I know,” he answered. 

* * *

  
The shriek that did break the world in half, however, came from Mother. 

“What have you done, Hamlet?” She asked, and both of them looked toward the curtains and the corpse beneath them all. “This is madness.”

Father patted him on the back; a ghost of a touch he never was awarded before. It was something of a wish when he was seven. It was a dream when he was eighteen. His skin sang victory. 

“It’s not,” he said.

* * *

Horatio was getting better at putting up with this new prince of his, Hamlet realized. Getting good and getting cautious. 

“Did you sleep, my lord?” He asked, since Ophelia drowned. 

“I did,” he said. He couldn’t promise; promises were made out of broken things, and they were drained so, so long ago. “I will.”

“Come to bed with me,” Horatio said, a hint of uncertainty creeping in his voice. “Will you?”

“I will,” he said, and didn’t move. 

* * *

  
The courtroom was freeing. The air was light, and he was dying. It all came to this, and this time, Father kissed his cheek instead. Mother was lying on the floor, spasming like a bird, then died like many others did around him. 

Horatio was holding him, and he thought, maybe there was something to be told here, amidst of death. Hamlet’s story. The one where his friend was good to him and did all for him and took nothing in return. The one where he loved a woman and loves her still. The one where he dies. It all sounded very charming. 

“You have always been so dear,” he muttered, choking around blood. “You have always been so much better.”

Horatio shook his head. It was dramatic, but there was beauty in it; there was madness, too, but they rarely exist outside of each other’s confines. 

“Do I?” Horatio smiled through the gore and the tears until all became silent. 

Hamlet’s mouth moved, stretched, and forced itself to form a word, a love, a truth. 

“Yes.”


End file.
